Violin Memory has teamed up with Toshiba on a new family of server-based PCIe NAND flash cards. Violin said the two companies shared intellectual property to develop the product.

Hiroyuki Sato, VP of Toshiba's storage division, said the PCIe card market was important to the company's customers. “Expanding our strategic relationship with Violin Memory will allow us to bring the valuable Violin enterprise IP to a broad range [of] industry-leading solutions in our future product offerings.”

The Toshiba alliance enables Violin to have full visibility and control of the supply chain, manufacturing, distribution, and research-and-development efforts at the foundry, chip and software layers, Violin said.

The product is called Velocity PCIe. Because the cards use a lightweight driver, expensive host CPU and DRAM resources are not required, according to Violin.

The Velocity family includes:

• 1.37TB to 11TB of capacity (per card) ranging from $3/GB to $6/GB list price
• Form factors that range from low-profile to full-height and full-length

“Our new focus on PCIe cards will allow both companies to drive radical new economics that lead to the mass adoption of memory-based architectures,” Don Basile, CEO of Violin, said. “NAND memory is now a requirement at every level from the smart connected device to the core of the cloud and the enterprise data center.”